Thought Leadership as a Job Role and Program

A couple of times, I’ve been hired to do thought leadership as part of my role. Honestly, I think the companies involved knew I was going to do it anyway, so they wrote it into my job description.

And this happens a lot. There are all sorts of people turning out great thought leadership at their companies, as an ancillary job to their official role.

But could someone be hired to do this full-time?

I assume so? I do not know someone who has an explicit full-time role with this job description, but let’s create one: “Thought Leadership Program Director.” What would this person do?

Here’s what this person would need to do –

Internal Marketing, Recruitment, and Leadership

Some people are just programmed to share. Call it altruism, call it narcissism, whatever – some people just have an in-built need to share content.

How do you extrapolate this to an organization? How do you build a “culture of thought leadership” to a group of people?

You need to corral leadership, convince people of the value, prove that value, and become a cheerleader and feedback mechanism for their efforts. Most any program with wither and die on its own. Someone will need to be constantly pushing it forward.

Type or Flavor Definition

Technical areas would have to be identified that the organization is going to concentrate. Who are the audiences What is the technical message? What type of skill is the organization trying to demonstrate?

See also The Flavors of Thought Leadership.

Experience Identification

Someone has to find things inside the company worth talking about. I maintain one of the biggest problems in organizations is the general opacity of what the company or its customers are doing.

Someone needs to keep track of customers. I promise you that there are so many stories in your organization right now, but know one knows about them. How do you create “customer observability”?

Continuing Process Management

The goal is to generate a steady stream of high quality content. This doesn’t happen by accident. It requires someone to manage the process – the ideation, the creation, the approvals, the formatting and design, etc.

Additionally, some people with immense technical knowledge and stories to tell will need help creating and editing content. You will need to train – and more important re-train – people on how to get content development.

You will need to monitor the out and debug the process when something gets “clogged.” There will always be something wrong, and you will need to be constantly refinining and smoothing the process to keep content flowing.

Distribution and Promotion

Organic content discovery only goes so far. Once the content is out in the world, it needs to be promoted.

Who are the audiences – both audiences who would be genuinely interested in the content, and the audiences who would view the mere existence of the content as a referendum on the value of the organization?

How do you promote your content without annoying people? How do you achieve some level of organic sharing?

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To be clear, this is a Marketing-ish role. The big difference is that your medium is content, not advertising or brand programs or whatever. You’re marketing through content which is not directly promotion, but is rather representative of the value your company provides.